TEL AVIV: As the Sabbath evening approached, Mr Ehud Barak paced the living room floor of his home high above a street in north Tel Aviv, its walls lined with thousands of books on subjects ranging from philosophy and poetry to military strategy.
Mr Barak, Israel's Defence Minister, is the most decorated soldier in the country's history and one of its most experienced politicians. He now faces, along with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and 12 other members of Israel's inner security Cabinet, the most important decision of his life - whether to launch a pre-emptive attack against Iran.
'This is not about some abstract concept,' Mr Barak said in an interview on Jan 13 as he gazed out at the lights of Tel Aviv, 'but a genuine concern. The Iranians are, after all, a nation whose leaders have set themselves a strategic goal of wiping Israel off the map.'
BACKGROUND STORY
YES, IF...
Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak says these three kinds of questions need to be answered before a decision is madetoattack:
- Does Israel have the ability to cause severe damage to Iran's nuclear sites and bring about a major delay in the Iranian nuclear project? And can the military and the Israeli people withstand the inevitable counter-attack?
- Does Israel have overt or tacit support, particularly from the US, for carrying out anattack?
- Have all other possibilities for the containment of Iran's nuclear threat been exhausted, bringing Israel to the point of last resort? If so, is this the last opportunity for an attack?
For the first time since the Iranian nuclear threat emerged in the mid-1990s, at least some of Israel's most powerful leaders believe that the response to all of these questions is yes.
When reminded of the opinion voiced by former Mossad chief Meir Dagan that the Iranian threat was not as imminent as he and Mr Netanyahu have suggested and that a military strike would be catastrophic, he reacted with uncharacteristic anger. He and Mr Netanyahu, he said, were responsible 'in a very direct and concrete way for the existence of the State of Israel - indeed, for the future of the Jewish people'.
'It's good to have diversity in thinking and for people to voice their opinions,' he added. 'But at the end of the day, when the military command looks up, it sees us - the Minister of Defence and the Prime Minister. When we look up, we see nothing but the sky above us.'
Mr Barak laid out three categories of questions, which he characterised as 'Israel's ability to act', 'international legitimacy' and 'necessity', all of which require affirmative responses before a decision is made to attack.
The first category of questions: Does Israel have the ability to cause severe damage to Iran's nuclear sites and bring about a major delay in the Iranian nuclear project? And can the military and the Israeli people withstand the inevitable counter-attack?
The second category: Does Israel have overt or tacit support, particularly from America, for carrying out an attack?
The third: Have all other possibilities for the containment of Iran's nuclear threat been exhausted, bringing Israel to the point of last resort? If so, is this the last opportunity for an attack?
For the first time since the Iranian nuclear threat emerged in the mid-1990s, at least some of Israel's most powerful leaders believe that the response to all of these questions is yes.
Cooperation between American, British and Israeli intelligence services uncovered in 2002 a uranium-enrichment facility at Natanz, about 320km south of Teheran. This led to a visit to the site by a team of inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency, who were surprised to discover that Iran was well on its way to completing the nuclear fuel cycle - the series of processes for the enrichment of uranium that is a critical stage in producing a bomb.
Despite the international sanctions that followed, Israeli intelligence reported in early 2004 that Iran's nuclear project was still progressing. Then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon assigned Mr Meir Dagan, then head of the Mossad, the task of ending the programme. Mr Sharon granted Mossad virtually unlimited funds and powers to 'stop the Iranian bomb'.
MrDagan came up with a 'five-front strategy' that involved political pressure, covert measures, counter-proliferation, sanctions and regime change. From 2005 on, various intelligence arms and the US Treasury, working together with the Mossad, began a worldwide campaign to locate and undermine the financial underpinnings of the Iranian nuclear project.
As well as efforts to disrupt the supply of nuclear materials to Iran, the Iranian nuclear project has been hit since 2005 by a series of mishaps and disasters, for which Teheran holds Western intelligence services and the Mossad responsible. According to the Iranian media, two transformers blew up and 50 centrifuges were ruined during the first attempt to enrich uranium at Natanz in April 2006. The Iranians suspected the Mossad when computer viruses penetrated the computer system of the nuclear project and caused widespread damage.
Of all the covert operations, the most controversial has been the assassinations of Iranian scientists working on the nuclear project. In January 2007, Dr Ardeshir Husseinpour, who was working at the Isfahan uranium plant, died under mysterious circumstances. The official announcement of his death said he had been asphyxiated 'following a gas leak'.
Mr Massoud Ali Mohammadi, a particle physicist, was killed in January 2010 when a booby-trapped motorcycle parked nearby exploded as he was getting into his car. Later that year, two motorcyclists blew up the cars of nuclear scientists Majid Shahriari and Fereydoun Abbasi-Davani.
This past July, a motorcyclist shot dead Mr Darioush Rezaei Nejad, a researcher for Iran's Atomic Energy Organisation. Four months later, an explosion at a Revolutionary Guards base killed Brigadier-General Hassan Moghaddam, head of its missile-development. And, last month, Mr Mostafa Ahmadi-Roshan, a deputy director at the Natanz uranium- enrichment facility, was killed by a limpet mine attached to his car.
The Iranians vowed revenge. This week, Israel claimed that Iran was behind a series of attempted attacks on Israeli diplomats in Thailand, India and Georgia.
Mr Dagan, while not taking credit for the assassinations of Iranian scientists, has praised the hits attributed to the Mossad and believes that his five-front strategy has succeeded in significantly delaying Iran's progress towards developing nuclear weapons.
Mr Barak and Mr Netanyahu are less convinced of the Mossad's long-term success. From the beginning of their terms (Mr Barak as Defence Minister in June 2007 and Mr Netanyahu as Prime Minister in March 2009), they have held the opinion that Israel must have a military option ready in case covert efforts fail. Mr Barak ordered extensive military preparations for an attack on Iran that continue to this day.
Mr Barak disagrees with the parallels that some Israeli politicians, mainly his boss, Mr Netanyahu, draw between MrAhmadinejad and Adolf Hitler. 'I accept that Iran has other reasons for developing nuclear bombs, apart from its desire to destroy Israel, but we cannot ignore the risk,' he said in an interview last month. 'The moment Iran goes nuclear, other countries in the region will feel compelled to do the same.'
He also warned that no more than one year remains to stop Iran from obtaining nuclear weaponry. This is because it is close to entering its 'immunity zone' - a term coined by MrBarak that refers to the point when Iran's accumulated know-how, raw materials, experience and equipment (as well as the distribution of materials among its underground facilities) - will be such that an attack will not be able to derail the nuclear project.
Over the past year, Western intelligence agencies, in particular the CIA, have moved closer to Israel's assessments of the Iranian nuclear threat. US Defence Secretary Leon Panetta expressed this explicitly when he said that Iran would be able to reach nuclear-weapons capabilities within a year.
Now that the facts have been largely agreed upon, the arguments the Israelis anticipate are those that will stem from the question of how to act - and what will happen if Israel decides that the moment for action has arrived. The most delicate issue between the two countries is what America is signalling to Israel and whether Israel should inform America in advance of a decision to attack.
Mr Matthew Kroenig is the Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and worked as a special adviser in the Pentagon from July 2010 to July last year. One of his tasks was defence policy and strategy on Iran. He said in an interview last month: 'My understanding is that the US has asked Israel not to attack Iran and to provide Washington with notice if it intends to strike. Israel responded negatively to both requests. It refused to guarantee that it will not attack or to provide prior notice if it does.'
Mr Kroenig went on: 'My hunch is that Israel would choose to give warning of an hour or two, just enough to maintain good relations between the countries but not quite enough to allow Washington to prevent the attack.'
'The future can evolve in three ways,' he said. 'Iran and the international community could agree to a negotiated settlement, Israel and the US could acquiesce to a nuclear-armed Iran, or Israel or the US could attack. 'Nobody wants to go in the direction of a military strike,' he added. But 'unfortunately, this is the most likely scenario. The more interesting question is not whether it happens but how. The US should treat this option more seriously and begin gathering international support and building the case for the use of force under international law'.
Israeli law stipulates that only the 14 members of the security Cabinet have the authority to make decisions on whether to go to war. The Cabinet has not yet been asked to vote but the ministers may, under pressure from Mr Netanyahu and MrBarak, answer these crucial questions about Iran in the affirmative: that these coming months are indeed the last opportunity to attack before Iran enters the 'immunity zone'.
Interviews with many senior Israeli leaders and chiefs of the military and intelligence strongly suggest that Israel will indeed strike Iran this year. Perhaps the US will choose to intervene but here, from the Israeli perspective, there is not much hope for that. Instead there is that peculiar Israeli mixture of fear - rooted in the sense that Israel is dependent on the tacit support of other nations to survive - and tenacity, the fierce conviction, right or wrong, that only the Israelis can ultimately defend themselves.
NEW YORK TIMES
